Study Tools

The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer

Character List

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

The Knight

The Knight rides at the front of the procession described
in the General Prologue, and his story is the first in the sequence.
The Host clearly admires the Knight, as does the narrator. The narrator
seems to remember four main qualities of the Knight. The first is
the Knight’s love of ideals—“chivalrie” (prowess), “trouthe” (fidelity), “honour”
(reputation), “fredom” (generosity), and “curteisie” (refinement)
(General Prologue, 45–46).
The second is the Knight’s impressive military career. The Knight
has fought in the Crusades, wars in which Europeans traveled by
sea to non-Christian lands and attempted to convert whole cultures
by the force of their swords. By Chaucer’s time, the spirit for
conducting these wars was dying out, and they were no longer undertaken
as frequently. The Knight has battled the Muslims in Egypt, Spain,
and Turkey, and the Russian Orthodox in Lithuania and Russia. He
has also fought in formal duels. The third quality the narrator
remembers about the Knight is his meek, gentle, manner. And the
fourth is his “array,” or dress. The Knight wears a tunic made of
coarse cloth, and his coat of mail is rust-stained, because he has
recently returned from an expedition.

The Knight’s interaction with other characters tells us
a few additional facts about him. In the Prologue to the Nun’s Priest’s
Tale, he calls out to hear something more lighthearted, saying that
it deeply upsets him to hear stories about tragic falls. He would
rather hear about “joye and greet solas,” about men who start off
in poverty climbing in fortune and attaining wealth (Nun’s Priest’s
Prologue, 2774). The Host agrees with him,
which is not surprising, since the Host has mentioned that whoever
tells the tale of “best sentence and moost solaas” will win the
storytelling contest (General Prologue, 798).
And, at the end of the Pardoner’s Tale, the Knight breaks in to stop
the squabbling between the Host and the Pardoner, ordering them to
kiss and make up. Ironically, though a soldier, the romantic, idealistic Knight
clearly has an aversion to conflict or unhappiness of any sort.

The Pardoner

The Pardoner rides in the very back of the party in the
General Prologue and is fittingly the most marginalized character
in the company. His profession is somewhat dubious—pardoners offered indulgences,
or previously written pardons for particular sins, to people who
repented of the sin they had committed. Along with receiving the
indulgence, the penitent would make a donation to the Church by
giving money to the pardoner. Eventually, this “charitable” donation
became a necessary part of receiving an indulgence. Paid by the
Church to offer these indulgences, the Pardoner was not supposed
to pocket the penitents’ charitable donations. That said, the practice
of offering indulgences came under critique by quite a few churchmen,
since once the charitable donation became a practice allied to receiving
an indulgence, it began to look like one could cleanse oneself of
sin by simply paying off the Church. Additionally, widespread suspicion
held that pardoners counterfeited the pope’s signature on illegitimate
indulgences and pocketed the “charitable donations” themselves.

Chaucer’s Pardoner is a highly untrustworthy character.
He sings a ballad—“Com hider, love, to me!” (General Prologue, 672)—with
the hypocritical Summoner, undermining the already challenged virtue
of his profession as one who works for the Church. He presents himself
as someone of ambiguous gender and sexual orientation, further challenging
social norms. The narrator is not sure whether the Pardoner is an
effeminate homosexual or a eunuch (castrated male). Like the other
pilgrims, the Pardoner carries with him to Canterbury the
tools of his trade—in his case, freshly signed papal indulgences
and a sack of false relics, including a brass cross filled with stones
to make it seem as heavy as gold and a glass jar full of pig’s bones, which
he passes off as saints’ relics. Since visiting relics on pilgrimage had
become a tourist industry, the Pardoner wants to cash in on religion
in any way he can, and he does this by selling tangible, material objects—whether
slips of paper that promise forgiveness of sins or animal bones
that people can string around their necks as charms against the
devil. After telling the group how he gulls people into indulging
his own avarice through a sermon he preaches on greed, the Pardoner
tells of a tale that exemplifies the vice decried in his sermon. Furthermore,
he attempts to sell pardons to the group—in effect plying his trade
in clear violation of the rules outlined by the host.

The Wife of Bath

One of two female storytellers (the other is the Prioress),
the Wife has a lot of experience under her belt. She has traveled
all over the world on pilgrimages, so Canterbury is a jaunt compared
to other perilous journeys she has endured. Not only has she seen
many lands, she has lived with five husbands. She is worldly in
both senses of the word: she has seen the world and has experience
in the ways of the world, that is, in love and sex.

Rich and tasteful, the Wife’s clothes veer a bit toward
extravagance: her face is wreathed in heavy cloth, her stockings
are a fine scarlet color, and the leather on her shoes is soft,
fresh, and brand new—all of which demonstrate how wealthy she has
become. Scarlet was a particularly costly dye, since it was made
from individual red beetles found only in some parts of the world.
The fact that she hails from Bath, a major English cloth-making
town in the Middle Ages, is reflected in both her talent as a seamstress
and her stylish garments. Bath at this time was fighting for a place
among the great European exporters of cloth, which were mostly in
the Netherlands and Belgium. So the fact that the Wife’s sewing
surpasses that of the cloth makers of “Ipres and of Gaunt” (Ypres
and Ghent) speaks well of Bath’s (and England’s) attempt to outdo
its overseas competitors.

Although she is argumentative and enjoys talking, the
Wife is intelligent in a commonsense, rather than intellectual,
way. Through her experiences with her husbands, she has learned
how to provide for herself in a world where women had little independence or
power. The chief manner in which she has gained control over her husbands
has been in her control over their use of her body. The Wife uses
her body as a bargaining tool, withholding sexual pleasure until
her husbands give her what she demands.

his story begins off with him telling everyone about drunken Flemish people.
then talks about their vices
he is very hypercritical
hates swearing
story is about a guy who poisons everyone else so that he could have all the gold
his tale ends with him trying to sell relics even though he told everyone in his prologue that they are fake

After further inspection I'd like to point out that John doesn't actually seem all that jealous. Just because the narrator says he is doesn't mean his actions point that way. He leaves Alisoun alone with Nicholas and he lets her listen to Absolon's love song.

Perhaps John is simple "sely" or naive, rather than jealous. He says he loves her more than his life, so maybe John is just blinded to her betrayal because he loves his wife so much. That might be a better moral to the story. He still cares about the earthly world (his wife) mor